Archives for the 'Aid' Category

The French translation of The While Man’s Burden, Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, has just come out. I wonder if many in France will pay attention to William Easterly’s warning.

It shows how Haitians are trapped in a cycle of environmental disaster, hunger, and aid dependency – it is perhaps the most extreme example of what is happening to many of the world’s poorest countries.

One man tells Hartley that Haitians are praying to God for the food aid to continue forever.

The only dissenting voice is a priest working in a refugee camp, where thousands live off aid while waiting for the next emergency. He says:

“We think relief has lasted too long. The people are now in a vicious circle. You want them to take their futures in their hands. At the same time you’re feeding them. You’re giving them all they need. What do you expect?”

The BBC website has published an article by a Sierra Leonian journalist about the effects of aid on Africa. The continent, Sorious Samura argues, has little to show for the $400bn it has received over 50 years:

“People often say a nation gets the government it deserves. And we Africans have certainly made some bad choices in terms of leaders, but all too often Western aid has ended up bankrolling them.

Aid has offered legitimacy to corrupt and autocratic regimes, allowing them to hang on to power even when they have lost popularity with their own citizens…

Many sub-Saharan African countries have had high levels of aid dependence – in excess of 10% of gross domestic product, or half of government spending – for decades.

When half the government budget comes from aid, African leaders find themselves less inclined to tax their citizens.

As a result, governments that are highly dependent on aid pay too much attention to donors and too little to the actual needs of their own citizens.

And unfortunately donors have their own objectives which are not always the same as the citizens of African countries.

Building new schools and clinics in record numbers looks good on paper and makes politicians look good in front of voters back home.

But when these clinics lack the most basic facilities and there are not enough teachers in the classroom, it is the ordinary Africans who get a raw deal.

Another criticism of aid increasingly voiced by Africans, but rarely heard in the West is that it sponsors failure, but rarely rewards success.

While I was filming in Uganda, local newspaper editor Andrew Mwenda took me and my crew to his home village near the town of Port Loco in the west of the country. There he introduced us to two men, one in his sixties and one aged 26.

‘This man represents the tragedy of aid,’ he said pointing to the older of the two. ‘While this man represents the potential of aid,’ he said indicating the younger man.

Mr Mwenda explained that the sexagenarian was the chairman of the local parish council who had spent most of his life living off aid money, supervising projects meant to benefit the community. Today he is an alcoholic who still lives with his mother.

The younger man started selling potatoes in the village square at the age of 17.

Less than 10 years later he owns the largest and busiest store in the village. He has not received one penny from aid, yet he has bought himself land and has built a house.

‘So you see,’ Mr Mwenda said. ‘If aid were to offer this young man support in the form of low interest credit he could not only expand his business offering employment opportunities and a valuable service to his community, he could also eventually pay the money back.’

But instead of funding innovation and creativity, aid has funded the chairman’s dysfunctional lifestyle.
Prolonged aid programmes also have wider implications for developing economies.

Thirty years of aid dollars flowing into the Ugandan economy has left the country suffering from what economists refer to as the ‘Dutch disease’.

Large inflows of foreign currency push up the value of the Ugandan shilling making its agricultural and manufactured goods less price competitive.

This results in fewer exports and less home-grown, sustainable earnings for the country.

Local entrepreneurs such as coffee growers and flower exporters should be cashing in on rising food and commodity prices across the globe at the moment, but they are finding themselves crowded out of their own economy by foreign aid dollars.”

As Easterly explains, the link between assistance and growth is tenuous. The countries that have been most successful at promoting growth and reducing poverty (the two are linked) have received little or no aid.

(To be precise, the median aid-to-GDP ratio of the 10 countries with the highest per capita growth rates between 1980 and 2002 was 0.23%; the figure for the 10 countries with the lowest growth rates – all negative – was 10.98%. Kristof notes: “that says nothing about causation, but it’s still not very encouraging.”)

Easterly’s point is not that all aid is wasted – as some Western conservatives have argued (Tom DeLay said it meant “putting Ghana over Grandma”, updating French journalist Raymond Cartier’s 1960s dictum that public money should be spent on “Corrèze no Zambeze”.)

What Easterly criticizes is the stress placed on aid volumes by those calling for a “big push” (Jeffrey Sachs) or a “Marshall Plan for Africa.”

Between 1960 and 2000, Africa has received the cash equivalent of four Marshall Plans.

According to a former French ambassador, Africa has benefited from “a permanent Marshall Plan”– much of it has been wasted, stolen, nullified by stupid farming policies or sunk in wars.

Easterly must be quoted at length on the low returns of aid:

There is good data on public investment for twenty-two African countries over the 1970–1994 period. These countries’ governments spent $342 billion on public investment. The donors gave these same countries’ governments $187 billion in aid over that period.

Unfortunately, the corresponding “step” increase in productivity, measured as production per person, was zero. Perhaps part of the reason for this was such disasters as the five billion dollars spent on the publicly owned Ajaokuta steel mill in Nigeria, begun in 1979, which has yet to produce a bar of steel…

It seems strange that bureaucrats and politicians would focus on the input—total aid dollars spent.

The Hollywood producers of Catwoman, which won an award for being the worst movie of 2004, would not dare to argue with moviegoers that the movie wasn’t so bad because they had spent $100 million on making it.

We can understand the emphasis on aid volume only as reflecting the pathology that in aid, the rich people who pay for the tickets are not the ones who see the movie.

To learn more about the type of aid that works, read Kristof’s piece – or better still (I suspect) Easterly’s book. The main thing I want to note here is that both authors rightly place the burden on the aid lobby.

Assistance (I am not talking here about emergency relief – which also has pitfalls but where big pushes can be justified) must be assumed to be of little or no benefit to recipients, unless proven otherwise.

The media, which had swooped on Niger after the BBC’s Hilary Andersson had first reported on the crisis in July, shared the aid workers’ outrage. The holy alliance between NGOs and journalists (you provide drama and we support your fund-raising effort by showing the pictures) was in full swing.

The Independent poured scorn on President Mamadou Tandja’s words by splashing them across its front page – “The people of Niger look well-fed, as you can see” – next to the picture of a skeletal child.

An online article by the BBC’s David Loyn accused Tandja of quibbling while Niger was starving: “How many dying babies make a famine?” Technically, he wrote, the crisis may not qualify as a “famine”, but pictures of desperate children “certainly look like ‘famine’ to the outside world”.

Loyn quoted Amartya Sen’s dictum that “no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy”, suggesting that Niger’s government was responsible for the crisis.

There you have it: callous leader ignores plight of his people and blames outsiders who are trying to help.

But Tandja’s comments should not have been dismissed so easily. They raised serious points about the appropriate response to a food emergency.

He was right to state that the crop failures and locust invasions that caused the food shortages were not particularly severe.

The farming website Fews paints a nuanced picture: the situation is critical in some areas, but Niger’s overall cereal output in 204-2005 is 11% down on a five-year average.

Tandja argues that by giving the impression that the whole country was in the grips of a famine, the NGO community was serving its own interest rather than Niger’s.

This is a not a ridiculous idea. We have been there before.

In 2002 the world heard of an imminent famine in Southern Africa. The UN warned about millions being at risk.

Journalists (including Hilary Andersson) fanned out across the region and found the pictures of dying babies they were looking for. The international aid machine went into full gear.

Among the countries watching all this with alarm was Zambia. Everyone said it was starving, while in fact it had only experienced a poor harvest with little rain in some regions.

Although the country was able to feed itself, the UN World Food Program was sending plane loads of surplus corn to Zambia, threatening to deal a massive blow to local farmers.

The Lusaka government put its foot down. It put a halt to aid shipments, citing the dubious excuse that the US grain it was receiving was genetically modified (the Zambians wanted to please Europe, in the naïve hope that they could one day break into EU markets).

The reaction was ferocious. As Der Spiegel noted in a recent article on aid which commendably does not endorse the NGO line, “countries which attempt to defend themselves against what is supposed to be charity have to expect to be harshly slapped down”.

The US ambassador to Zambia said: “Leaders who refuse to let their people have food should be put in the dock for the most serious crimes against humanity.”

Of course there was no such crime. The halt to aid shipments did not trigger a famine in Zambia, which was able to feed itself.

It may be that Niger 2005 is a not a repeat of Zambia 2002.

I am prepared to believe that the current emergency is real, rather than a case of the charity business trying to justify its existence.

But Tandja’s arguments should be countered rationally, not ridiculed. It would have been helpful, for instance, if NGOs had explained how lessons from the mistakes of 2002 had been learnt.

But the automatic response to the president’s comment gives suggests that at least once thing has not changed: the North still assumes that dumping tons of food aid on a country is good, and gets angry when the South fails to respond as a grateful ward.

“Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray.”

As I write highly civilized human beings are singing on a stage, hoping to get my money.

They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are “only doing their duty”, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted, law-abiding people men who would never dream of committing fraud in real life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in parting me from my life-saving, he will never sleep the worse for it. He is serving a good cause, which has the power to absolve him from evil.

One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of the humanitarian impulse. Show an overfed Westerner like me the picture of a starving African child and I immediately feel responsible for this scandalous state of affairs. Before I know it I feel like reaching for my cheque book.

What is wrong with that? Aren’t the citizens of former colonial powers at least partly to blame for world poverty? And regardless of who is responsible, do we not have a duty to give?

To answer these questions, it is best to listen to Africans. All of those I have spoken to during my travels and in my job over the years have blamed their own governments for poverty.

Every day they see the well-connected thrive, while ordinary people have to grease palms to see the doctor or get through the next police roadblock.

I found their attitude neatly encapsulated in short film by the BBC’s Joseph Warungu broadcast during a debate on Africa’s problems on the BBC last Thursday From the time they are born, Warungu says, people in his native Kenya are expected to pay “something small” to all sorts of officials, until they realize they have lost something big. The grinding humiliation of having to bribe your way through life is Africa’s greatest plague, Warungu says.

But the Live 8 crowd is not interested in any of this: it is not about the West – the only people who matter. Africans are supposed to shut up and open their mouths only to be fed.

Not only are the pop stars not listening to Africans – they are not speaking to them. The concerts are entirely aimed at Westerners and their leaders. “Eight men in one room can change the world,” the electric board above the Hyde Park stage reads, with huge portraits of George Bush, Tony Blair, et al hanging in the background.

Another slogan read: “G8 – The World is Watching.” But to help end poverty in Africa, the leaders who need watching are those of, say, Cameroon, Sudan, Kenya, Nigeria, Chad, Ivory Coast, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Angola – to take just the eight most corrupt countries on the continent as identified by the organisation Transparency International.

The original Live Aid focused the world’s attention on Ethiopia, but turned its gaze away from the cause of the famine – the Mengistu regime. It was as if charities from Mars had landed in Europe during World War II, and beamed back pictures of cities in ruins and concentration camps without saying a single word about the Nazis, urging their planet to “Feed the Earth”.

Twenty years later, Gerdof and Co show the same inability to confront unpleasant facts, the same unthinking contempt for the continent they intend to save.

Yes, we the rich have a duty to help the poor. But why should we hand our money over to kindly frauds who see Africans as wards of the West rather than the potential makers of their own wealth?

As the Kenyan writer Aidan Hartley said during the BBC debate: “It is shameful that the future of Africa should be decided by white pop stars playing bad music.”

As was the case in the bad old days of colonialism, Westerners regard Africans as helpless wards. Hartley is right to be angry – although I find him a bit harsh about the music.

As I write, the Who are giving a splendid performance of one of their greatest hits:

“If… we stopped giving aid to Africa” – this startling hypothesis is the title of a TV programme broadcast by the BBC on Sunday. Its refreshing bluntness contrasts with standard media coverage of aid issues – dripping with well-meaning nonsense ahead of next month’s Live-8 concerts.

Africans might be better off if the do-gooders left them alone. The people making this suggestion are anything but right-wing cranks: the programme features interviews with Richard Dowden of the Royal African Society, Robert Guest of The Economist, Alex de Waal of Justice Africa, James Shikwati, who heads a Kenyan NGO, and Tony Vaux, a former Oxfam man who wrote a remarkable 2001 book on the subject, The Selfish Altruist.

Since the 1960s the continent has received $1 trillion. If all that was needed to spur development was cash, Africa would be an economic giant by now. The money not only appears to have done little good, but at times it has been positively harmful. Aid has perverted incentives, promoted dependency (“Feed the world” is a monstrous slogan, which treats Africans as pure recipients, not as partners), undermined local farming, propped up dictatorships and allowed wars to fester.

The programme highlights well-known cases of aid being hijacked – by the Ethiopian Stalin, Mengistu Haile Mariam, in 1984-85, and by Rwanda’s genocidal Hutus a decade later. According to Shikwati, Westerners have played more than a supporting role in wrecking the continent. “Aid has destroyed Africa,” he says.

Many experts over the years have warned about the unintended but foreseeable side effects of aid. But such healthy scepticism remains taboo in polite society and in the media. This is particularly the case in Britain, where most people still believe that the cause of the Ethiopian famine was drought.

Few Britons to this day realise that this myth allowed Mengistu to use food as a weapon in a vicious conflict, with the complicity of NGOs whose motto (as Vaux puts it in his book) boiled down to “Don’t mention the war!”

Aid can of course be useful – even vital – and the recent (conditional) debt write-off is welcome. But as Bob Geldof and his high-fidelity first-class-travelling set get ready to take to the stage again – and sing the same do-goody-good bullshit as 20 years ago – it is useful to remind people that givers are not always on the side of the angels.

Charity entails dilemmas, i.e. conflicts not between good and evil but between good and good.